Canonical Text Services Protocol
I haven’t mentioned this before, and I’m not sure how I found out about it, but here’s a link: The Canonical Text Services Protocol.
The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a network service for identifying and working with texts. CTS joins the conceptual model of “texts” described by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (or FRBR) with a hierarchical model of canonical citations that is traditional in many areas of the humanities.
The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a hierarchical scheme of “works.” As in FRBR, the “work” is a conceptual entity: an abstract idea of the content expressed in all versions of a work, in the original language or in translation, but in CTS, the work’s original language is specified. CTS organizes works in “groups” that have no direct parallel in FRBR. Groups organize works according to traditional citation practice. They may reflect authorship (e.g., a work entitled Huckleberry Finn might belong to a group named “Mark Twain”), or may represent some other kind of corpus (e.g., a work numbered 1 belonging to a group named “Federalist Papers”). Works may include specific versions, called “expressions” in the FRBR model; in CTS, these are identified as either editions or translations, with language of translations explicitly identified. These expressions may in turn be represented by specific exemplars, or “items” in FRBR parlance.
Beyond identifying works, as the FRBR model aims to do, CTS provides a hierarchical model for citation of sections of a work. A prose work like Herodotus’ Histories might be organized in a book/chapter/section scheme, or an epic poem might be cited by book and line.